THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 3, 2016
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house, they found that it had been de-
stroyed. "It was unbelievable," he said,
sweeping his arm across the tent. "It was
gone, gone, gone." But his tone was non-
chalant, as if he were referring to some-
thing much milder, like a car accident.
He didn't want to burden me with all
the details.
Fateh spoke decent English, winc-
ing when he thought he'd mispro-
nounced something. He was impa-
tient to begin learning German, and
confident that he would find a place
in a German school. Assimilation
seemed to present few challenges for
him. But his father appeared crushed.
He lay on the floor, staring at the metal
beams of the tent. A relative of theirs
hovered nearby, looking warily around
and examining the bottles of water to
see if they had been tampered with.
Fateh periodically glanced over at them
with concern. When I asked him what
their future in Germany might be, he
shrugged.
I spoke to Cemile Giousouf, a poli-
tician who is a rising star of the C.D.U.
and is well placed to understand the po-
sition of people like Fateh.Thirty-eight
years old, she is of Turkish descent and
the first Muslim member of the C.D.U.
to enter the Bundestag. Looking around
her o ce there---a shrine to multicul-
turalism, adorned with Islamic, Chris-
tian, and Jewish iconography---I won-
dered how she would defend her party's
burka ban, which had been proposed a
few days earlier. Her answer showed
how valuable she is to a party that has
traditionally had little in the way of mul-
ticultural bona fides. "When my parents
came to Germany, in the seventies, my
father worked in a factory," she said. "He
never learned German. I still have to
translate letters for him when I'm home.
But German wasn't as necessary for the
work he was doing as it is for the work
we need immigrants to do now. I'm
talking about nurses, I.T. programmers,
and so on. You need to know German
to do these jobs, and so we need people
to integrate more quickly. We can't a ord
to wait a whole generation."
T met Petry was in
August, back at the Saxony State
Parliament. When I arrived, she was
standing in a glass atrium, speaking
sternly to a group of advisers---all men,
all much taller than she was, and most
at least a decade older. She looked like
a young Renaissance prince consult-
ing with his courtiers. She was com-
plaining about the latest machinations
of one of her AfD rivals, a favorite
topic. We moved to a pressroom, where
Petry addressed a handful of journal-
ists about the AfD's budget policy.
Her speech was, as usual, boring, but
its dullness muted the radicalism of
her proposal---to defund asylum shel-
ters and put the money into teachers'
salaries.
Afterward, in her o ce, we talked
about the AfD's connections to other
populist movements. She has estab-
lished close ties with Heinz-Christian
Strache, the leader of Austria's Free-
dom Party, and has also met with Geert
Wilders, the star of the Dutch far right.
She told me that a colleague had re-
cently met with Marine Le Pen, of
France's Front National, and that over
the summer she had spoken to vari-
ous American Republicans, including
the Iowa congressman Steve King, who
has compared immigrants to dogs and
suggested building an electric fence on
the U.S. border with Mexico. When I
asked her what she thought of Don-
ald Trump, she said, "My impression
is that Trump may become the Amer-
ican President, because the alternative
to him, Hillary Clinton, is just so un-
convincing. She is almost like a copy
of someone like Merkel---someone
who just keeps on with the same pol-
icies that led to the trouble in the first
place." She admired the American will-
ingness to take risks: "It might not be
better under Trump, but at least with
him there is the chance to change."
She thought that German politics
was more weighed down by liberal pi-
eties. "It's so moral to allow these at-
tacks to happen," she said sarcastically.
"It's so moral to promise to people
around the world that they can come
to Germany and find paradise." She
found this outlook anti-democratic,
disdainful of the views of ordinary Ger-
mans. "I myself am not morally good,"
she said. "I'm just a human being. I try
to stick to the rules. And I think there
is a majority of Germans who agree
with me. So, reducing the entire En-
lightenment and all of the successes of
European history down to this need
to be morally good: I find that ex-
tremely dangerous. There's this saying
of Nietzsche"---she took out her phone
and pulled up the quote almost in-
stantly. "Here it is, in 'Zarathustra':
'The good have always been the be-
ginning of the end.' "
"I'm sick of experts telling me what paints I can't drink."
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